Korean Cyberattack Fails to Foil Crypto-Ratings Release

PALM BEACH GARDENS, FL — Weiss Ratings, the nation’s leading independent rating agency of financial institutions, has released today the nation’s first-ever grades on cryptocurrencies by a financial rating agency, despite a massive Korean cyberattack on its website. Weiss gives Bitcoin a C+ (meaning “fair”) and Ethereum a B (“good”). None of the cryptocurrencies covered currently get a grade of A (“excellent”).

Weiss Ratings staff was up all night last night fending off denial of service attacks from Korea, as evidenced by numerous mentions on Korean social media of a concerted call to bring down the Weiss Ratings website. “Earlier commentary on social media expressed considerable fear we were about to release negative ratings on their preferred currencies,” said Weiss Ratings founder Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. “So this may be an attempt to thwart our release today.”

Separately, Weiss experienced a surge in friendly visitors to the site. “Since our customers are almost entirely in the U.S., we rarely get more than small amounts of traffic from Asia. But last night, we had more than 100,000 unique visitors in a matter of hours, almost entirely from Asia, until early this morning, when more of the traffic rolled over to Europe. To handle the volume, our staff instantly expanded its server capacity on the cloud many times over,” Weiss said.

What makes Weiss’ entry into cryptocurrency ratings significant is its history of independence and accuracy in other investment sectors, as noted by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), Barron’s,The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, among others.

“Despite extreme price volatility, cryptocurrencies have a bright future and the potential to deliver unusually large profits to investors,” said Weiss Ratings founder Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. “However, the market is hectic and confusing for investors. They need the clarity that only robust, impartial ratings can provide.”

The Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings evaluate price risk, reward potential, blockchain technology, adoption, security, and other factors. “Due to rapid changes in the data,” explains Weiss, “upgrades and downgrades are more frequent than in other sectors we cover.”

Below is a sampling of Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, selected randomly to illustrate a variety of strengths and weaknesses:

Bitcoin (rated C+) gets excellent scores for security and widespread adoption. But it is encountering major network bottlenecks, causing delays and high transactions costs. Despite intense ongoing efforts that are achieving some initial success, Bitcoin has no immediate mechanism for promptly upgrading its software code.

Ethereum (B), the second most widely adopted cryptocurrency, benefits from more readily upgradable technology and better speed, despite some bottlenecks.

Novacoin (D) and SaluS (D) are weak in terms of both technological innovation and adoption.

Steem (B-) enjoys a relatively good balance of moderate strength in nearly all the key factors considered along with a social network feature.

“All else being equal, as a cryptocurrency overcomes its individual challenges, it’s likely to be upgraded promptly,” Weiss adds.

Weiss Ratings, which began in 1971, rates 55,000 institutions and investments. Unlike Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, Fitch and A.M. Best, Weiss never accepts compensation of any kind from the entities it rates.

To learn more about the Weiss Cryptocurrency Ratings, go here. This site was established as a back-up and will be reachable until hackers discover it. Plus, those still having difficulty reaching Weiss Ratings websites can email crypto@weissinc.com.

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About Weiss Ratings: Barron’s called Weiss Ratings “the leader in identifying vulnerable companies.” The profit performance of Weiss Stock Ratings was ranked #1, as reported in The Wall Street Journal, ahead of all major rating agencies and research companies covered, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Standard and Poor’s. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that Weiss Ratings of U.S. life and health insurers greatly outperformed those of Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and A.M. Best. More information on Weiss Crypto Currency Ratings can be found here.

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Comments 31

John SoloJanuary 24, 2018

So the entire list isn’t published? I’d have thought for the first ever listing you’d give that away free to generate interest. I can tell you in the crypto world that crypto investors will not pay for this service without completely understanding its value. Maybe after this first publishing you charge going forward?

Tom SamsonJanuary 24, 2018

How on earth could you grade Litecoin lower than so many scams or coins with no development teams for 2+ years?

“excellent scores for security and widespread adoption”–Bitcoin
So this is not as important as Ethereum’s upgradeability?

How many times has the ethereum’s wallets been hacked and Ethereum hard forked because it NEEDED to be upgraded after hacks?

deJanuary 24, 2018

any results regarding IOTA? did you even include it in your analysis?

Paul BondJanuary 24, 2018

It’s a long time since I’ve seen such inaccurate descriptions. If you look at the BTC mempool lately now that ‘the other’ has stopped spamming it recently, and how many lightning nodes have appeared around the same time, and what future proposals are under review for contracts, time locks, then it would be clear that the article description needs a rewrite.

BTC blockchain will never be full of features, that’s the design. It’s too important to security to be flippant with it, that’s where the 2nd layer components go, without compromising the underlying blockchain.

Jon McadamsJanuary 24, 2018

You rated dogecoin and verge on the same level as projects like ripple, stellar and monero. What is your logic behind that?

You missed a lot. XRP ledger with XRP token is crucial part of RippleNet and new financial distributed system. Learn about xRapid then see how xRapid/Xrp connect to xCurrent. You’ll realise xrp is well needed 😉

bitconsultJanuary 24, 2018

Everything else in this article can be ignored once you see Bitcoin = C+. Blockchains exist for immutability which is achieved through decentralization and Proof of Work mining. Bitcoin is THE immutable ledger. Bitcoin has GitHub commits from over 1000 developers. BTC currently has scaling problems, because it’s being used, unlike many other cryptocurrencies. All of the best blockchain devs in the world are working on BTC scaling solutions including Lightning Network, Schnorr signatures, and MAST. Everything else is a centralized sandbox project in comparison to Bitcoin.

Oh come on, currently active bitcoin devs is fairly 30 and in total not more then 300 different people ever contributed to it. Also it’s is not magically immutable as you imagine. Just see back in the year 2010 when the blockchain had to be reverted due to bug in the code. Not to mention centralised mining pool and development . And fyio LN doesn’t bring anything new then current banking system.

JustinJanuary 24, 2018

Where is Ripple XRP on this report?

Jack ReacherJanuary 24, 2018

This is not accurate at all not based on code at all….. You give Cardano a higher rating than Bitcoin and it has no code to show. Great idea just keep educating people on entirely wrong facts.

I am Korean.January 24, 2018

It is not cyber attack !
just too many Koreans trying to visit your site at the same time.
If Koreans see your web, your countdown time was changed to Korea time automatically.
So many Koreans misunderstood countdown time.
We are not Chinese.
We don’t need attack your web, just we want see ranking.

Chinese just want to see ranking too, we don’t have any interested in attacking this site .

qrmillerJanuary 24, 2018

I wanted to thank you for taking this new industry seriously enough to give it your professional attention in rating what the coins are valued at against each other…and this is really what your professional rating allows us, as investors, to do! So thank you! And congratulations on being the first rating service to actually take this future global currency as seriously as we do!

All the best!

Jaehyun MoonJanuary 24, 2018

Thanks good information

Klm SoyeonJanuary 24, 2018

Thanks a lot for your ratings.

PaulJanuary 24, 2018

the funny thing is, bitcoin allready has the cheaptest and fastest transactions of all currencies out there.
everyone can use lightning right now, they just have to do a little bit for it. but not even the biggest fiat exchange coinbase as adopted any of the new technologies provided by the bitcoin core team. they are using 3 years old outdated software, unable to even implement segwit.

MJanuary 24, 2018

@weissratings Recommend reviewing this story. I recently moved to South Korea and I can tell you even I was shocked by how popular cryptocurrencies are here. More so than in the U.S. for sure, as many are accepted as payments at many venues. I’m 110% sure that the vast majority of the traffic you experienced was legitimate and the entire community was up late last night waiting to take a look. Not a hit on your cyber team but it’s a bit naïve to make that claim, specially if you look at the exchanges and how popular they are in this area.

-M
CISSP, CISM, CISA, et al.

Mark DonJanuary 25, 2018

You guys are far too generous. These coins have almost no real world use. They’re junk, they should be rated D E and F all. Tether will guarantee market collapse in few days

The cryptocurrency market will collapse! We never heard that one before…

Viet thuanJanuary 25, 2018

Thanks…

TommyJanuary 25, 2018

Steem reverse splits every 3 years 10/1. So it can dilute 10x every three yesrs and do it again. So unless if u think steem can continue to grow more than 10x every three years so i can just break even….it deserves an F as an investment. No way it can keep up with its dilution.